In 1989 a group of Chinese government urban planners came to Europe on a fact-finding mission. They were widely praised for curbing car use – the country of 1 billion people, after all, had just a few million vehicles; the bicycle was king; its city streets were safe and the air mostly clean. How did they manage to have so few cars? asked their hosts, grappling as ever with chaotic British streets, traffic jams and pollution.
“But you don’t understand,” replied one of the delegation. “In 20 years, there will be no bicycles in China.”
He was nearly right. China’s breakneck development has been led by mass car ownership. It now has 300m cars – and what was once the kingdom of bikes is now the land of 20-lane motorways, more than 100,000 petrol stations and scrap metal yards. Beijing, Shanghai and most other cities are choked with traffic, their air is some of the worst in the world, and their hospitals are full of children with asthma and respiratory diseases. China, like every other country, is having to rethink the car.
The worldwide love affair with the car, which promised consumers convenience, status and freedom, is over. The reality from Hotan to Hull and Lagos to Lahore is that the car is now a social and environmental curse, disconnecting people, eroding public space, fracturing local economies, and generating sprawl and urban decay. With UK temperatures hitting highs of 40C this summer, this reality has become impossible to ignore. Instead of the prospect of speed and cheap mobility, consumers now get soaring costs, climate breakdown and air pollution, the devastation of nature, mounting debt, personal danger and ill health, and the most serious energy crisis in 30 years.
Now the World Health Organization is worried. Car accidents are the eighth highest cause of death for people of all ages, and the leading cause among young people aged 5-29 worldwide. At least 1.3 million people die in car accidents every year, with a further 20 to 50 million people sustaining injuries, often at phenomenal personal and financial cost.
Here in the UK, 24,530 people were killed or seriously injured on roads in 2020/21, which costs the country around £36bn a year, or around 20% of the current NHS budget, according to the legal firm Hugh James. In the US it is even worse: government figures show that traffic accidents and their knock-on impacts cost nearly $1tn (£800bn) a year, and that more than 624,000 people died in fatal crashes between 2000 and 2017. That compares with the 535,000 American military personnel estimated to have died in both world wars. In China, 250,000 people a year die in accidents.
Heavy pollution hangs over elevated motorways in Shanghai.
‘Beijing, Shanghai and most other cities in China are choked with traffic.’ Heavy pollution hangs over elevated motorways in Shanghai. Photograph: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images
But we may be reaching “peak car”, the point at which the world is so saturated with vehicles – and cities and individuals are so fed up or financially stretched by them – that they are banned or voluntarily given up. As UK petrol hits £2 a litre and it costs £100 to fill up a tank – on top of the thousands of pounds paid out in loans and taxes to own a car in the first place – it is unsurprising that young people especially are eschewing them and taking to other forms of transport.
The auto-magic that has entranced societies for a century has gone. When the cost of living crisis started to bite, Ireland, Italy and others (although not the UK) cut public transport fares by as much as 90% (in Germany). Spain has gone a step further, announcing that train travel on many routes will be free from September to the end of the year. Global car sales, already stuttering before the pandemic, are now declining in China, Russia and Germany. UK new car sales have fallen for five months in a row and the level of UK car ownership has now fallen for two consecutive years – the first successive drops in ownership in more than a century.
From here on, it looks like death by 1,000 breakdowns for the private car. Just as the coach and horse were pushed out by automobiles 120 years ago, so the car is being steadily evicted from world cities by the authorities or by public revulsion. As thousands of jubilee street parties showed, car-free streets are popular, and the surest and best way to save money, improve health and make cities quieter and more livable. A recent report from the Centre for London shows how low-traffic neighbourhoods, introduced widely during the pandemic to encourage walking and cycling, reduce car use and make roads safer. Wales has slashed the default speed limit on residential roads from 30mph to 20mph.
Countries may have little choice but to reduce car use. There is wide agreement that car mileage must be cut by at least 20% by 2030 just to meet climate targets. Milan, Paris, Hamburg, Copenhagen and most European cities are now either banning cars from their centres on a large scale or making it prohibitively expensive to drive in them. They are pushing at an open door. London car ownership is reducing – and recently, 50,000 Berliners asked the city to impose the world’s largest car ban, covering 34 sq miles.
In this urban century, where nearly 70% of people are expected to live in built-up areas within 30 years and the global population is expected to grow by another 3 billion by 2100, the private car makes little economic or social sense. Ride sharing apps, car sharing, e-bikes and scooters are all hastening the car’s demise. City leaders, as well as health, transport and environment groups, are now calling for it to be made easy and affordable for people to leave the car at home or get rid of it – and for cities to be reimagined so that people can access key things like food and health centres on foot or by bike.
It is time for cities to take advantage of lessons learned during the pandemic and the unfolding energy, environment and cost of living crises, and start to design themselves not around the car, but around the bicycle and the pedestrian. But it is also time for those who deify the car, and continue to aggressively assert its place in our social and economic hierarchy – and its untrammelled right to road space – to understand that a page has been turned. The sooner they accept that, the easier the future and their part in it will be.
The car as we know it is fast becoming extinct; it is a relic of a former age. Sitting in a traffic jam in a ton of metal that belches pollution and costs a fortune will surely be seen by future generations as not just stupid, but criminal.
I’ll accept it when there is a viable alternative
You can live (very well) without a car in London, maybe in the Netherlands and some German cities…but it is still “king” almost everywhere else
Idk about that one, I cannot get to the shops without a car because the nearest supermarket is 10 miles away and the single bus that goes through my village every couple of hours doesn’t even stop anywhere near that shop
This just isn’t true. I live in a major town about 25 miles south of Manchester where I work. There is a direct train, just 2 stops and 35 min and I’m there. It costs £17.99 on peak return. If I drive, granted it takes a bit longer but I can park for the day for 8 quid and the fuel isnt too bad.
It should not be cheaper for me to drive 50 miles round trip and park all day in a large city than getting the train. I know there are season pass etc but I don’t work from the office every day so it doesn’t work out.
Everyone should just stay where they’re put and stop moving around.
Lol. Such obvious horseshit.
Odds this article is written by someone in London who doesn’t own a car because they have perfectly viable public transport options?
An article written by a person that has never set foot out of a city or large town.
Yet again making a comment to remind redditors that the UK is larger than London.
The car will always be king.
Bus here is 5 a day to travel 15 minutes
My current motorbike has done this trip for 2 weeks on 15 of fuel and could probably do the month
Why the fuck would I use public transport ?
It will be a long time until the convenience of the car is mitigated by any other form of travel the only thing that will change is the energy source my own feeling is that small city cars will be purely electric and larger long distance will be hydrogen hybrids where they plug in at night then top up with hydrogen for longer journeys
I live in a rural ish area. No trains, one bus per day and I would have to walk 2 miles to get it. Nearest supermarket 6 miles away where the bus doesn’t go.
As much as I agree with the sentiment, there’s very much a naturalistic fallacy at play here – just because something ought to be, doesn’t mean it is. That said, I do think car culture may have reached its peak – I don’t think we’re getting any more motorways built in the UK, and the trend does seem to be on more restrictive motoring rules (see Highway Code changes, focus on LTNs and LEZs).
And, on a personal level, fuck cars. Fuck ’em. I say that as a car driver who owns and drives my own vehicle. They suck. They’re expensive, noisy and polluting, and the “freedom” they engender is so contingent on losses elsewhere that it’s ridiculous that we treat it as normal. The amount of space in our lives we devote to these things is utterly, utterly absurd.
Surely the shift towards electric cars is far more plausible than the shift towards car-free.
Yeah well make using the trains a lot cheaper lol
I’ve lived very successfully for four decades, and in no major cities (but near, and not in, different towns), with no car.
Anyone who says you need a car to live in this country is talking none sense. Of course, you plan your life around it. I wouldn’t somewhere with zero public transport.
But to me: that’s exactly what we all should be doing. Not driving, and assuming that we need to walk or use public transport.
I have a 90s sports car and it was cheaper to drive myself and my girlfriend to London, paying parking, fuel, congestion charge and ULEZ charge than pay for 2 train tickets. That really shouldn’t be how it works
As with most articles about our car-centric society, the posts here are unable to see more than one step into the issue.
“what?! no car! how do i get to the shops?!”
As if the process and structure of weekly shops isnt entirely an outcome of the car itself, rather than the other way around.
As if the proposal is the government come take your car and tell you to do one.
You could really try a little harder to engage with the issues but i guess it’s better to just natter on about MeTroPoliTan eLiteS
Alternative title “The age of “public transport in shambles” is here. the sooner we accept it the better.”
If you live rurally and work a 9-5 with a commute public transport is non existant
Public transport is just too shite if you live out of London to not use a damn car
Yep , go to Llandudno from Liverpool , with toddler , pregnant wife and bag of things that you need…on your bike , then come back because next day you have to drop him to nursery at 8 , and be at work 25 mins later having 12 miles distance ahead of you.
Then on Friday pick up your weekly shopping at Tesco on your bike.
Or bring from hospital your newborn baby and half death wife back home late Friday evening by bus in February.
It really does depend where you live, if you’re in the countryside, you either have a car or moped or you can’t have a job – the buses don’t run often or early enough to get you to work, and it’s not like you can ride a horse in.
If you’re in London, I can’t imagine why you would want to bother with a car.
Except it isn’t
Ahm… no it’s not.
Im a highways engineer and my one of my key roles is appraising projects to ensure that walkers cyclists and horse riders are included in the design, including design recommendations to incorporate them, so i feel I’m qualified to talk about this.
We have lots of massive issues that prevent the reduction in car use and and an upscale in public transport and bike use. Sorry this is a long one, its something i know about and im passionate about.
**infrastructure -** our infrastructure is built around the car. Even removing the car will require mixed use road for lorries/busses and bikes. For an inexperienced user this is terrifying so cycle segregation is needed, but we just dont have the space for that in a lot of places and removing the car from these people will essentially render them without transport. *** There are various solutions to this which as engineers we are developing, quiet roads, restricting all vehicle access etc but they can be unpopular.
**Population density -** To have effective pubic transport you need hubs, we call them trip generators in the industry, to connect between. These hubs need to have a high draw or high population to warrant something like a bus service or an incredibly high draw to warrant a train due to the cost. Now the issue here is suburbs, im ignoring villages as we’ll just focus on cities here. Its all fine having inter town busses but if it takes 20 minutes walk each end the car will be preferable, especially for a commute as its done every day. The suburbs problem is a mixture of issues in itself, like poor medium density housing quality, culture and development laws. *** This is almost impossible to fix at the moment, we’d need a radical change in policy to get this moving and no one in power has the stomach for that. the bike is the best bet for sorting this but not a fantastic solution considering how far most people are willing to ride.
**Freedom/Reliability -** With a car we can go wherever, whenever pretty quickly and go to add hock places. Public transport requires us to follow their timetable and that can be unreliable. There is also the travel to and from the bus stop/train station. When I look to reduce flow on a road improving public transport links is always considered but always rejected as a solution and its often due to this. People just don’t want to to use the public transport when they can have a faster and more reliable journey by car. *** This could largely be solved with nationalised public transport with a government happy to run it at a loss as that way I wont need a business case recommend the public transport and it could at least be implemented along with other measures
**Safety -** This is multiple factors. People just don’t feel safe on public transport to start. People don’t feel safe riding bikes and where town centres are completely pedestrianised people don’t feel safe walking through there at night. To cap it all off people don’t feel safe driving and its a massive reason we see so many 4x4s about in cities. Again this is big cultural and policy solutions. *** If we all walked/cycled/used public transport more it would be okay, but we need a critical mass to do it. The other side of it is more police about but thast not happening ay time soon.
**The Good News -** Every day my industry pushes to install infrastructure that gets us away from the car. Its slow, and fraught with problems, but it is happening. We will plateau unless the above is sorted. I honestly do not believe we will see large scale road projects in 10 years other than bypasses. My role will change from designing full new roads to designing routes for just walkers and cyclists while altering roads to allow for public transport to be built or run on them more effectively.
TLDR, we have a society built around the car, from housing to personal safety. I as a highways engineer face societal challenges everyday and without big changes to our collective culture, governance and perceptions around safety will really struggle to get to a point of ditching the car. We are trying to fix it and having some success, but we really need much higher level planning to come in.
People acting like it’s only London with good public transport are ridiculous
I live in Lancashire in a small town, I have a train station where I can get a train straight to Manchester, many smaller towns and beyond
Aswell as having pretty good bus connections also that link a large number of nearby places
And ontop of that everything being walkable
It’s very much possible to live without a car in most cases but people are too stubborn to actually give it a try
When the government invests in good public transport to all areas of the country then sure. But plenty of places you have no other choice until then
More Guardian nonsense.
Give me an alternative that’s better. That actually works , is clean, reliable , convenient and doesn’t mean I’m sitting next to a drunk and or obnoxious idiot, then I’m in. Right now though, I’ve yet to find anything that meets or exceeds that bar
Too many people don’t realise that the late 20th century car focused way of life is not the norm. Its a blip on the grand scale of history.
A world without cars is a silly dream. Not going to happen. But we need to stop designing the country around them. For anyone living near a city they should be a luxury extra rather than an absolute necessity.
Businesses need to move goods from A to B.
People need to move from A to B.
More people than ever before. No new road infrastructure. In fact significantly less road infrastructure = chaos. Closing posh roads to keep the middle classes happy with LTN. Absolute joke.
Trains are useless, expensive and on strike.
TFL is equally useless, cheap but also on strike.
Busses are cheap but slow because of traffic, also on strike.
Car is king and will remain so until we find a better way to move from A to B.
I cycle to the office/ all over, I drive for days out of London or food shopping.
Hardly ever use the tube unless going shopping.
>The age of the ‘car is king’ is over.
*Looks outside*
Are you sure?
30 minute drive into the city center versus 2 hour combination of buses and trains. Nah mate. Age of the car isn’t close to being over.
36 comments
In 1989 a group of Chinese government urban planners came to Europe on a fact-finding mission. They were widely praised for curbing car use – the country of 1 billion people, after all, had just a few million vehicles; the bicycle was king; its city streets were safe and the air mostly clean. How did they manage to have so few cars? asked their hosts, grappling as ever with chaotic British streets, traffic jams and pollution.
“But you don’t understand,” replied one of the delegation. “In 20 years, there will be no bicycles in China.”
He was nearly right. China’s breakneck development has been led by mass car ownership. It now has 300m cars – and what was once the kingdom of bikes is now the land of 20-lane motorways, more than 100,000 petrol stations and scrap metal yards. Beijing, Shanghai and most other cities are choked with traffic, their air is some of the worst in the world, and their hospitals are full of children with asthma and respiratory diseases. China, like every other country, is having to rethink the car.
The worldwide love affair with the car, which promised consumers convenience, status and freedom, is over. The reality from Hotan to Hull and Lagos to Lahore is that the car is now a social and environmental curse, disconnecting people, eroding public space, fracturing local economies, and generating sprawl and urban decay. With UK temperatures hitting highs of 40C this summer, this reality has become impossible to ignore. Instead of the prospect of speed and cheap mobility, consumers now get soaring costs, climate breakdown and air pollution, the devastation of nature, mounting debt, personal danger and ill health, and the most serious energy crisis in 30 years.
Now the World Health Organization is worried. Car accidents are the eighth highest cause of death for people of all ages, and the leading cause among young people aged 5-29 worldwide. At least 1.3 million people die in car accidents every year, with a further 20 to 50 million people sustaining injuries, often at phenomenal personal and financial cost.
Here in the UK, 24,530 people were killed or seriously injured on roads in 2020/21, which costs the country around £36bn a year, or around 20% of the current NHS budget, according to the legal firm Hugh James. In the US it is even worse: government figures show that traffic accidents and their knock-on impacts cost nearly $1tn (£800bn) a year, and that more than 624,000 people died in fatal crashes between 2000 and 2017. That compares with the 535,000 American military personnel estimated to have died in both world wars. In China, 250,000 people a year die in accidents.
Heavy pollution hangs over elevated motorways in Shanghai.
‘Beijing, Shanghai and most other cities in China are choked with traffic.’ Heavy pollution hangs over elevated motorways in Shanghai. Photograph: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images
But we may be reaching “peak car”, the point at which the world is so saturated with vehicles – and cities and individuals are so fed up or financially stretched by them – that they are banned or voluntarily given up. As UK petrol hits £2 a litre and it costs £100 to fill up a tank – on top of the thousands of pounds paid out in loans and taxes to own a car in the first place – it is unsurprising that young people especially are eschewing them and taking to other forms of transport.
The auto-magic that has entranced societies for a century has gone. When the cost of living crisis started to bite, Ireland, Italy and others (although not the UK) cut public transport fares by as much as 90% (in Germany). Spain has gone a step further, announcing that train travel on many routes will be free from September to the end of the year. Global car sales, already stuttering before the pandemic, are now declining in China, Russia and Germany. UK new car sales have fallen for five months in a row and the level of UK car ownership has now fallen for two consecutive years – the first successive drops in ownership in more than a century.
From here on, it looks like death by 1,000 breakdowns for the private car. Just as the coach and horse were pushed out by automobiles 120 years ago, so the car is being steadily evicted from world cities by the authorities or by public revulsion. As thousands of jubilee street parties showed, car-free streets are popular, and the surest and best way to save money, improve health and make cities quieter and more livable. A recent report from the Centre for London shows how low-traffic neighbourhoods, introduced widely during the pandemic to encourage walking and cycling, reduce car use and make roads safer. Wales has slashed the default speed limit on residential roads from 30mph to 20mph.
Countries may have little choice but to reduce car use. There is wide agreement that car mileage must be cut by at least 20% by 2030 just to meet climate targets. Milan, Paris, Hamburg, Copenhagen and most European cities are now either banning cars from their centres on a large scale or making it prohibitively expensive to drive in them. They are pushing at an open door. London car ownership is reducing – and recently, 50,000 Berliners asked the city to impose the world’s largest car ban, covering 34 sq miles.
In this urban century, where nearly 70% of people are expected to live in built-up areas within 30 years and the global population is expected to grow by another 3 billion by 2100, the private car makes little economic or social sense. Ride sharing apps, car sharing, e-bikes and scooters are all hastening the car’s demise. City leaders, as well as health, transport and environment groups, are now calling for it to be made easy and affordable for people to leave the car at home or get rid of it – and for cities to be reimagined so that people can access key things like food and health centres on foot or by bike.
It is time for cities to take advantage of lessons learned during the pandemic and the unfolding energy, environment and cost of living crises, and start to design themselves not around the car, but around the bicycle and the pedestrian. But it is also time for those who deify the car, and continue to aggressively assert its place in our social and economic hierarchy – and its untrammelled right to road space – to understand that a page has been turned. The sooner they accept that, the easier the future and their part in it will be.
The car as we know it is fast becoming extinct; it is a relic of a former age. Sitting in a traffic jam in a ton of metal that belches pollution and costs a fortune will surely be seen by future generations as not just stupid, but criminal.
I’ll accept it when there is a viable alternative
You can live (very well) without a car in London, maybe in the Netherlands and some German cities…but it is still “king” almost everywhere else
Idk about that one, I cannot get to the shops without a car because the nearest supermarket is 10 miles away and the single bus that goes through my village every couple of hours doesn’t even stop anywhere near that shop
This just isn’t true. I live in a major town about 25 miles south of Manchester where I work. There is a direct train, just 2 stops and 35 min and I’m there. It costs £17.99 on peak return. If I drive, granted it takes a bit longer but I can park for the day for 8 quid and the fuel isnt too bad.
It should not be cheaper for me to drive 50 miles round trip and park all day in a large city than getting the train. I know there are season pass etc but I don’t work from the office every day so it doesn’t work out.
Everyone should just stay where they’re put and stop moving around.
Lol. Such obvious horseshit.
Odds this article is written by someone in London who doesn’t own a car because they have perfectly viable public transport options?
An article written by a person that has never set foot out of a city or large town.
Yet again making a comment to remind redditors that the UK is larger than London.
The car will always be king.
Bus here is 5 a day to travel 15 minutes
My current motorbike has done this trip for 2 weeks on 15 of fuel and could probably do the month
Why the fuck would I use public transport ?
It will be a long time until the convenience of the car is mitigated by any other form of travel the only thing that will change is the energy source my own feeling is that small city cars will be purely electric and larger long distance will be hydrogen hybrids where they plug in at night then top up with hydrogen for longer journeys
I live in a rural ish area. No trains, one bus per day and I would have to walk 2 miles to get it. Nearest supermarket 6 miles away where the bus doesn’t go.
As much as I agree with the sentiment, there’s very much a naturalistic fallacy at play here – just because something ought to be, doesn’t mean it is. That said, I do think car culture may have reached its peak – I don’t think we’re getting any more motorways built in the UK, and the trend does seem to be on more restrictive motoring rules (see Highway Code changes, focus on LTNs and LEZs).
And, on a personal level, fuck cars. Fuck ’em. I say that as a car driver who owns and drives my own vehicle. They suck. They’re expensive, noisy and polluting, and the “freedom” they engender is so contingent on losses elsewhere that it’s ridiculous that we treat it as normal. The amount of space in our lives we devote to these things is utterly, utterly absurd.
Surely the shift towards electric cars is far more plausible than the shift towards car-free.
Yeah well make using the trains a lot cheaper lol
I’ve lived very successfully for four decades, and in no major cities (but near, and not in, different towns), with no car.
Anyone who says you need a car to live in this country is talking none sense. Of course, you plan your life around it. I wouldn’t somewhere with zero public transport.
But to me: that’s exactly what we all should be doing. Not driving, and assuming that we need to walk or use public transport.
I have a 90s sports car and it was cheaper to drive myself and my girlfriend to London, paying parking, fuel, congestion charge and ULEZ charge than pay for 2 train tickets. That really shouldn’t be how it works
As with most articles about our car-centric society, the posts here are unable to see more than one step into the issue.
“what?! no car! how do i get to the shops?!”
As if the process and structure of weekly shops isnt entirely an outcome of the car itself, rather than the other way around.
As if the proposal is the government come take your car and tell you to do one.
You could really try a little harder to engage with the issues but i guess it’s better to just natter on about MeTroPoliTan eLiteS
Alternative title “The age of “public transport in shambles” is here. the sooner we accept it the better.”
If you live rurally and work a 9-5 with a commute public transport is non existant
Public transport is just too shite if you live out of London to not use a damn car
Yep , go to Llandudno from Liverpool , with toddler , pregnant wife and bag of things that you need…on your bike , then come back because next day you have to drop him to nursery at 8 , and be at work 25 mins later having 12 miles distance ahead of you.
Then on Friday pick up your weekly shopping at Tesco on your bike.
Or bring from hospital your newborn baby and half death wife back home late Friday evening by bus in February.
It really does depend where you live, if you’re in the countryside, you either have a car or moped or you can’t have a job – the buses don’t run often or early enough to get you to work, and it’s not like you can ride a horse in.
If you’re in London, I can’t imagine why you would want to bother with a car.
Except it isn’t
Ahm… no it’s not.
Im a highways engineer and my one of my key roles is appraising projects to ensure that walkers cyclists and horse riders are included in the design, including design recommendations to incorporate them, so i feel I’m qualified to talk about this.
We have lots of massive issues that prevent the reduction in car use and and an upscale in public transport and bike use. Sorry this is a long one, its something i know about and im passionate about.
**infrastructure -** our infrastructure is built around the car. Even removing the car will require mixed use road for lorries/busses and bikes. For an inexperienced user this is terrifying so cycle segregation is needed, but we just dont have the space for that in a lot of places and removing the car from these people will essentially render them without transport. *** There are various solutions to this which as engineers we are developing, quiet roads, restricting all vehicle access etc but they can be unpopular.
**Population density -** To have effective pubic transport you need hubs, we call them trip generators in the industry, to connect between. These hubs need to have a high draw or high population to warrant something like a bus service or an incredibly high draw to warrant a train due to the cost. Now the issue here is suburbs, im ignoring villages as we’ll just focus on cities here. Its all fine having inter town busses but if it takes 20 minutes walk each end the car will be preferable, especially for a commute as its done every day. The suburbs problem is a mixture of issues in itself, like poor medium density housing quality, culture and development laws. *** This is almost impossible to fix at the moment, we’d need a radical change in policy to get this moving and no one in power has the stomach for that. the bike is the best bet for sorting this but not a fantastic solution considering how far most people are willing to ride.
**Freedom/Reliability -** With a car we can go wherever, whenever pretty quickly and go to add hock places. Public transport requires us to follow their timetable and that can be unreliable. There is also the travel to and from the bus stop/train station. When I look to reduce flow on a road improving public transport links is always considered but always rejected as a solution and its often due to this. People just don’t want to to use the public transport when they can have a faster and more reliable journey by car. *** This could largely be solved with nationalised public transport with a government happy to run it at a loss as that way I wont need a business case recommend the public transport and it could at least be implemented along with other measures
**Safety -** This is multiple factors. People just don’t feel safe on public transport to start. People don’t feel safe riding bikes and where town centres are completely pedestrianised people don’t feel safe walking through there at night. To cap it all off people don’t feel safe driving and its a massive reason we see so many 4x4s about in cities. Again this is big cultural and policy solutions. *** If we all walked/cycled/used public transport more it would be okay, but we need a critical mass to do it. The other side of it is more police about but thast not happening ay time soon.
**The Good News -** Every day my industry pushes to install infrastructure that gets us away from the car. Its slow, and fraught with problems, but it is happening. We will plateau unless the above is sorted. I honestly do not believe we will see large scale road projects in 10 years other than bypasses. My role will change from designing full new roads to designing routes for just walkers and cyclists while altering roads to allow for public transport to be built or run on them more effectively.
TLDR, we have a society built around the car, from housing to personal safety. I as a highways engineer face societal challenges everyday and without big changes to our collective culture, governance and perceptions around safety will really struggle to get to a point of ditching the car. We are trying to fix it and having some success, but we really need much higher level planning to come in.
People acting like it’s only London with good public transport are ridiculous
I live in Lancashire in a small town, I have a train station where I can get a train straight to Manchester, many smaller towns and beyond
Aswell as having pretty good bus connections also that link a large number of nearby places
And ontop of that everything being walkable
It’s very much possible to live without a car in most cases but people are too stubborn to actually give it a try
When the government invests in good public transport to all areas of the country then sure. But plenty of places you have no other choice until then
More Guardian nonsense.
Give me an alternative that’s better. That actually works , is clean, reliable , convenient and doesn’t mean I’m sitting next to a drunk and or obnoxious idiot, then I’m in. Right now though, I’ve yet to find anything that meets or exceeds that bar
Too many people don’t realise that the late 20th century car focused way of life is not the norm. Its a blip on the grand scale of history.
A world without cars is a silly dream. Not going to happen. But we need to stop designing the country around them. For anyone living near a city they should be a luxury extra rather than an absolute necessity.
r/fuckcars r/notjustbikes [Externalities of automobiles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalities_of_automobiles)
Businesses need to move goods from A to B.
People need to move from A to B.
More people than ever before. No new road infrastructure. In fact significantly less road infrastructure = chaos. Closing posh roads to keep the middle classes happy with LTN. Absolute joke.
Trains are useless, expensive and on strike.
TFL is equally useless, cheap but also on strike.
Busses are cheap but slow because of traffic, also on strike.
Car is king and will remain so until we find a better way to move from A to B.
I cycle to the office/ all over, I drive for days out of London or food shopping.
Hardly ever use the tube unless going shopping.
>The age of the ‘car is king’ is over.
*Looks outside*
Are you sure?
30 minute drive into the city center versus 2 hour combination of buses and trains. Nah mate. Age of the car isn’t close to being over.